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While there are plenty of free tools out there to help you manage your SEO, there are also quite a few paid tools that many businesses credit with their SEO success. If you can’t seem to get out of an SEO slump, a paid tool can help give you insights and help you streamline different tasks to get you to the next level and reach your goals.

Because there are so many tools that can help you improve your SEO, it can sometimes be overwhelming to determine which tools you need, which tools are worth the price, and which tools make a difference for SEO specifically. Fortunately, it helps to break up these tools into different categories, which will ensure that you aren’t paying for two different tools that offer you the same services, and we did this breaking down for you below!

SEO Tools to Help with Data Organization and Analysis

These are your SEO tools that do a little bit of everything. If easier data analysis and organization is what you’re after, your best bet is one of the tools below. These types of SEO paid tools are some of the most popular in the industry, so this is also a great place to start if you’re just getting started and aren’t sure exactly what you need help with just yet:

This is my favorite tool because it’s so easy to use and can offer a little bit of everything regarding SEO success. It’s main role for you would be to show organic and paid keywords for any website so that you can determine how successful a keyword may be working for any given page. It offers live updates about rankings, real-time reports, competitor SEO insights, and more. This is one of the most popular tools out there for Webmasters because of its intuitive design, so this is a great place to start your paid SEO strategy.

Ahrefs is a whole collection of tools that uses their own index of live links to help you see SEO insights that you wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else. In other words, this is a great option for you to run and then use to compare the data that Ahrefs offers vs. the data a platform like Google Analytics offers; thus giving you a deeper look into your metrics.

This tool will monitor rankings regularly and help you automate campaign monitoring, competitor tracking, and more. You can fill in which keywords and/or webpages you want tracked and the tool will then offer you insights so you can keep track of what is working and what’s not. You get tracking data every day, and can also track your competitor’s data without having to pay anything extra.

SEO Backlink and Keyword Management Tools

Keep in mind that sometimes you can find these features in the tools mentioned above, but below are a few tools that specialize in keyword management and backlinks quality.

CognitiveSEO can do a lot for your SEO, but they are best known for their backlink checker. This helps you see not only who is linking back to your content (and which content specifically), but it helps you evaluate whether or not the backlinks you’re earning are quality. With the tool you get snapshots of the sites that are linking back to your website, competitive research showing unnatural link profiles, anchor text analysis, and more.

Monitor Backlinks: $19 per month to $99 per month depending on the number of domains you want to track.

Monitor backlinks offers exactly what the name entails. If all you’re looking for is a way to monitor your backlinks and then analyze those links, this is a great tool for you. It will email you reports as frequently as you’d like and will categorize your backlinks for you by highest to lowest quality links and whether or not they are dofollow or nofollow. You have a dashboard to help you look at your results, and you can even input your competitor’s domain and compare your backlinks to their backlinks to help give you ideas.

This tool is probably known for it’s free version because it’s so simple to type in a domain name and get a list of backlinks for that domain, but the paid version also offers some excellent features. For example, the paid version helps you identify local links and gives you access to all of Moz’s other great tools such as Moz Local.

Tools to Help with Social Media

Pretty self-explanatory, social media tools can help you manage your social media, which can then help you earn more followers to your website and hopefully more backlinks and clicks overall. SEO is becoming more and more about authority, and social media can help a website get there.

Buffer is all about scheduling different social posts. For example, if you do all of your reading in the morning and find three things you want to share, you may not want to share them in the morning at all, and you definitely would not want to share them all at once, but in ultimately you don’t want to have to remember to go back and share at a time that isn’t convenient for you. Using Buffer, you can click “Buffer” and it will be shared at the time you specified on the Buffer dashboard/ platform.

Like most of the tools on this list, Buffer does offer a free version that you can try out first, but the paid version allows you to sync more than one account to use with Buffer and lets you connect your RSS feeds to your Buffer. You can also add more shares than you can with the free version, so it’s great for large companies.

Much like Buffer, Hootsuite can help improve your online presence by helping you manage multiple profiles and accounts. Unlike Buffer, however, you get a much more detailed dashboard and can manage many more social platforms such as StumbleUpon, Pinterest and more. Because Buffer is integrated with social media sharing buttons on many websites it is a better tool for the average searcher, but Hootsuite offers more information, which makes it ideal for a social media management team.

Of course, there are many more paid tools out there that can help you improve your SEO. I recommend visiting this article for many more great tools. In the meantime, let us know which tools worked for you and which paid tools you’ve been using in the past to help your SEO in the comment section below.